The Senate approved a wide-ranging $42.9 billion measure
to pay for improving U.S. border security, clamp down on illegal
immigration and beef up cyber security in fiscal 2010.

The Senate voted 84-6 for the annual spending bill funding the
Department of Homeland Security for the year starting October 1, and
now lawmakers must work out differences with a $42.6 billion version of
the bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives last month.

"Odds are this may not be the 1918-type of virus which was highly lethal and swept through the United States and swept through the world, but we can't count that out," said Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security.

"We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she told WRAL-TV. "It wasn't intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can't even defend."

This is an EMERGENCY ACTION ALERT to stop S.1261, The Pass Act which is worse than Real ID. We need to contact all the members of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to kill this before it gets to the Senate floor.

CCTV, RFID tags and GPS-enabled phones are among the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. The furore around the Chinese government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. Closed-circuit television cameras were first used in Germany in 1942 to remotely monitor the launch of V2 rockets. Since then, CCTVs have become one of the most contentious pieces of technology in public use.

Set
in the near future, UNCIVIL LIBERTIES shows a United States where the
government resorts to heightened surveillance of its own citizens in
the name of security, while domestic extremists boldly rebel and take
up arms in resistance.

Email from Mike
Duffey, Special Agent, Florida Department of Law Enforcement Computer
Crime Center, to the ICAC Task Force mailing list, describing the ease
with which he obtained a suspect’s information from MySpace (within 20
minutes),

Perhaps even
more alarming to Constitutionalists and civil libertarians than an “eye
in the sky” with carte blanche authority to surveil, is the fact that
the door to door firearms checks come at the behest of a foreign
government Mexico.

Radar technology could help U.S. border patrol agents spot underground
tunnels dug by human smugglers and drug traffickers along the border,
according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Tunnel diggers have been hard at work along the U.S. border
in recent days and months, the agency knows. Of every tunnel ever found
by a patrol agent, 60 percent were discovered in the last three years,
and patrollers spot a new one every month.

HR 1966 has cleared the House and now faces the Senate as S.909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act (officially, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act). The bill is expected to sail through the Senate

Until recently, the TSA has been a domestic legal Guantanamo, and the
TSA has treated their domain of “checkpoints” and travel control and
surveillance as a law-free zone where their powers of search, seizure,
detention, and denial of passage were unconstrained by the
Constitution, human rights treaties,
judicial review, or stautory or regulatory standards. As indeed it has
been: Congress has enacted no law specifically defining any limits on
the authority of TSA agents at checkpoints (or elsewhere), and the TSA
itself has never conducted any rulemaking or issued any
publicly-disclosed regulations defining its authority, its limits, what
orders travellers do or don’t have to comply with, and which forms of
“noncooperation” are considered grounds for which sanctions

"The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable
script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional)
world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to
interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book
could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone
actually wrote scripts for comics.

The House passed a $44 billion spending bill Wednesday that awards the
Homeland Security Department a 7 percent budget increase, with money
for more border patrol agents and for anti-piracy efforts off the coast
of Somalia.

Congratulations, suckers! Not only did you sign up for and pay money
to a totalitarian program, but as usual, the police state was run by
incompetents. Your little attempt to suck up to the TSA gestapo now
won’t be doing you any good.

A government official says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to kill a controversial program begun by the former Bush administration to use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law enforcement missions.The program was announced in 2007 and was to have been run by Homeland Security. It has been delayed because of privacy and civil liberty problems.

You have heard of the Miac report. Now here is yet another report. Another document
designating Americans as terrorists has surfaced. The document,
entitled “Crisis Controlled: Assessing Potential Threats of Violence,”
authored by Trooper John R. Wright,

What's more, the Department of Homeland Security report (”Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”) warned that, though only a small number of military veterans ...

It was Dec. 20, 2008, and Terry Bressi found himself idling through
a remote Border Patrol checkpoint on State 86. He was simply returning
from his job at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, on the Tohono
O'odham Reservation west of Tucson. But minutes later, he possessed a
newly minted citation for impeding traffic. One might be forgiven for assuming that traffic impediment is the
actual purpose of these checkpoints, which are popping up with
increasing regularity across the Southwest. But when it comes to Terry
Bressi, the Border Patrol and the Tohono O'odham Police Department have
a little score to settle.

The full-scale exercise offers agencies and jurisdictions a way
to test their plans and skills in a real-time, realistic environment
and to gain the in-depth knowledge that only experience can provide.
Participants will exercise prevention and information sharing functions
that are critical to preventing terrorist attacks.

We had a chance to ask some questions of the TSA’s Chief Privacy Officer, Peter Pietra, when he showed up at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference to talk about the SPOT
program, under which roving teams of TSA agents watch people in
airports for a (secret, of course) checklist of “suspicious” behavior,
question some of those people, and finger some of them for more intrusive search or further questioning when they reach the “screening” checkpoints.

Petra claimed that, “There isn’t any search or seizure … until the
checkpoint”, even if you decline to respond to questions from the SPOT
teams or other TSA agents. But, “At the checkpoint, it’s a different
story … There’s a ’special circumstances’ exception that would

WASHINGTON – An elderly man enters a crowded museum carrying a rifle and begins shooting. A young man in Arkansas pulls the trigger outside a military recruiting office. Another man opens fire in a Kansas church. Three chilling, unconnected slayings in less than two weeks. One gunman was a white supremacist, one a militant Muslim, one a fervent foe of abortion.

Harman, who chairs a House subcommittee on
domestic intelligence, wants Napolitano to kill the agency’s
deceptively named National Applications Office, established by the Bush
administration to funnel military intelligence to local, state and
federal law enforcement.